“Even though the parents were having their difficulties, you’d say he still had a good relationship with his daughter?”
Max nodded. “He’s always treated Erin like she was made of spun glass. Nothing’s too good for his Erin. That’s the way it’s always been. You’d think being raised like that, with two adoring parents, that Erin would be spoiled rotten, but she isn’t.
“Anyway, to go back to him and Marcia, he said that he wouldn’t have liked losing her, but that he could have accepted it eventually. He said he wished to God she were still alive.” Max broke off, sniffling into a fresh was of Kleenex he pulled from a box on a nearby table.
“It’s this damn cold,” he mumbled. “My nose just keeps running.”
I knew it wasn’t only his cold that was making Max’s nose run and eyes water. The Kelseys were Maxwell Cole’s good friends, his best friends, and slowly but surely they were being wrested from him. Max was just about at the end of his rope, but I had to press on anyway. Besides, I suspected that keeping him talking was actually doing him a favor. Answering my questions was the only thing preventing him from falling apart completely.
“So he said he knew he was losing his wife. Did he say how exactly?”
Max shook his head. “No, and I didn’t push him, and you wouldn’t have either. He was grieving, J.P. He was in pain, actual physical pain, I think. I listened to what he had to say, but I didn’t pry, although after what I read in the paper this morning, maybe…” Max’s voice drifted into a troubled silence without finishing the sentence.
“You said you didn’t know we were looking for him until this morning?”
“That’s right. As soon as he got here last night, he asked me to turn off the radio and leave it off. He also asked me not to answer the phone. He said he was afraid people might track him down here, and he didn’t want to talk to anyone else.”
“Tell me what happened when he saw the paper this morning.”
“Now, that was scary,” Max declared. “In all the years I’ve known him, I’ve never heard Pete Kelsey say a cross word, never heard him raise his voice in anger, but when he read that article, the libelous things that security guard’s wife said, I thought he was going to lose it completely. He picked up that brass poker over there by the fireplace. I was afraid he was going to rip the place apart.”
“What stopped him?” I asked.
Maxwell Cole, flabby and perpetually out of shape, would have been no match for the work-hardened muscles of Pete Kelsey.
“I talked him out of it,” Max said gravely. “I told him to think about Erin instead of himself. And that’s when he agreed to turn himself in. Just like that. He put down the poker and sat down and told me to go find you. He was very specific about that. He said he’d talk to you and nobody else.”
“Why? There are two detectives on the case. Why not Detective Kramer?”
“Pete didn’t say. Maybe he liked you better, thought he could trust you or something. There’s no accounting for taste, you know.” Max gave me a feeble grin.
“While you were talking, did he mention anything about going to the school district office Sunday night looking for Marcia?”
“No.”
“Or looking for her anywhere else?”
“No.”
“Did he say anything at all about that night?”
“No. Nothing.”
“Did he ever mention Vietnam to you?”
“No. Why should he? He was a Canadian citizen. My mother sponsored him when he applied to become a citizen. Why would he have had anything to do with Vietnam?”
“What was his first wife’s name?”
“His first wife? Why do you want to know that?”
“It might be helpful.”
“I don’t remember,” Max said. “That’s a long time ago, you know. I’m not sure I ever knew her name. I don’t think he ever told me. It was such a tragedy that he didn’t talk about it. I think it hurt him too much to think about it.”
“Or else it never happened,” I suggested grimly.
“You mean you think that was a lie as well?”
Gradually the full extent of Pete Kelsey’s betrayal was beginning to sink into Maxwell Cole’s consciousness. A friendship of twenty years’ standing was tumbling down around his ears like a house of cards.
“Why not?” I returned. “Since everything else was, why not that, too?”
“I can’t take it all in,” Max said. “I can’t understand it. ”I don’t want to understand it.“ Abruptly Max stood up. ”I hope that’s all the questions for now, because I need to hurry over to see Erin.“ He started out of the room and then paused and looked at me. ”Do you suppose she’s still at the Riggs’ place? That’s right here on Queen Anne.“
“You can check,” I said. “My guess is that no matter what Kelsey said, Erin stayed where she was last night. At home. And the grandparents probably stayed with her.”
With a sigh and a shake of his head, Max continued on into the kitchen to use the phone. I followed behind. Without having to look it up in the book, he punched in the Riggs’ phone number. He let it ring and ring, but there was no answer. He dialed another number, again from memory.
“Hello, George,” he said at once. Suspicions confirmed. The grandparents were indeed still at the house on Crockett. “Is Erin there?” Max asked, and after George responded, Max added quickly, “No, no. Don’t get her. This is Max. Maxwell Cole. I’m coming over to see her. Tell her to wait for me.” He paused and then added fiercely, “Don’t let her listen to the radio or watch television while she’s waiting.”
There was another pause while George Riggs asked a question. “Yes, there’s something wrong,” Max acknowledged reluctantly, “but I don’t want to talk about it over the phone. Just have Erin wait there. It’s very important.”
I followed Max out the door and down the walk to his waiting Volvo. He moved with a wooden, stiff-legged gait, like an aging, over-weight toy soldier. I didn’t envy him his errand. He was going to have to deliver the news that the last bastion of Erin Kelsey’s world was collapsing.
Not only was her mother dead and her father in jail, her father wasn’t who he had always claimed to be. That meant Erin wasn’t who she thought she was, either.
Both Max and Erin had been betrayed by Pete Kelsey’s web of lies and deceit. Both would be wounded by it.
Watching Maxwell Cole drive dejectedly away through the gray and suddenly overcast day, I wouldn’t have bet money either way about which one was going to be more hurt.
It was a moment after Max had driven out of sight before I realized I was standing there aching for him, and even while it was happening, I couldn’t quite believe it.
If, two days earlier, any one of a dozen people had tried to tell me that before the week was out, I’d be standing on Maxwell Cole’s doorstep feeling sorry for that poor, miserable bastard, I would have laughed in their faces and called them outright liars. Or crazy.
But they weren’t, because I was.
Chapter 22
It was well after five by the time I got back to the department. To get to my cubicle, I had to walk directly past Captain Powell’s fishbowl. Normally his glass-enclosed office would have been deserted at that hour, but on this particular afternoon it was standing room only. Captain Powell himself was there, along with Margie and Sergeant Watkins. Detective Kramer had assumed center stage and was busy playing up-roar.
“So I get outta court,” Kramer was noisily complaining. His voice rumbled through the open door and down the hallway as I came toward them. “I get outta court, and what do I find? Without saying a word to me, Beaumont has arrested this suspect, this Pete Kelsey character, and locked him up on some ancient charge of desertion. The booking paper doesn’t say word one about what’s going on with our case.”